


Can't Stand 'Em

by MagitekUnit05953234



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Bad Things Happen Bingo, Blood and Injury, But on yourself alone because you're stupid, Canon-Typical Violence, First Aid, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Nonstandard Use of Spell Flasks, Prompto love yourself challenge, Trans Male Character, Trans Prompto, Unreliable Narrator, Vomiting, Whump, in a major way
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-13
Updated: 2019-01-13
Packaged: 2019-10-09 08:48:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17403800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MagitekUnit05953234/pseuds/MagitekUnit05953234
Summary: The only thing that would make hundlegs worse, Prompto thinks, is if they had wings or something. That would be the sign that it was time for Prompto to shuffle off this mortal coil, honestly. You can’t combine a billion trillion legs, poison, and wings all in one absurdly massive insect and expect Prompto to still have hope for a good life.





	Can't Stand 'Em

**Author's Note:**

  * For [avianscribe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/avianscribe/gifts).



> Written to fill a Bad Things Happen Bingo square request for [avianscribe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/avianscribe/profile), who's a real peach  
>   
> Square filled: Doesn't realize (how badly) they're injured  
>   
> Important Note: Never use hydrogen peroxide on open wounds, guys. Someone does it in here because they have absolute basic first aid knowledge and don't know any better. Absolutely never do it when treating real life injuries. Obligatory disclaimer that I am not a doctor

Prompto knows they’re screwed when Gladio goes down. When Prompto takes a nosedive into unconsciousness in the middle of battle, it’s just another day in the office —the bloody, mud-stained, adrenaline-fueled office. When Ignis goes down, it’s cause for serious concern. Even he has his limits though, so it’s not as if it’s unthinkable. When Noct goes down, it’s panic-mode. Noct is pretty much equal in skill to Ignis, but he’s more important according to most methods of measuring human value be it royal oath, prophecy, or just the rose-tinted glasses love gives a man. Everyone loses their overprotective minds when Noct goes down. 

But Gladio? Well. Gladio is the stalwart Shield, strong in every way that matters, and probably plenty of ways that don’t as well. When Gladio goes down, it means whatever he was fighting is good and ready to tear everyone else who challenges it to pieces. 

Prompto swallows hard and reloads his gun. “Iggy, I’m gonna need some potions!”

“Not now, Prompto!” Ignis is back to back with Noctis, so the only person worthy of special attention during a fight in Iggy’s eyes (probably, anyway) is already accounted for. 

“It’s uh, it’s not for me!” Prompto dashes toward his fallen comrade, stumbling a little when he darts to the side and puts too much weight on the leg that got just a little bit mauled by a hundleg a few moments earlier. “It’s Gladio!”

That gets Ignis’s attention. He dispatches one of the hundlegs threatening him and Noct with a few quick flashes of steel and manages to make it to Gladio before Prompto, because of course he does. He’s just that good. 

“Cover us,” Ignis orders as he drops to his knees beside Gladio, hands quickly busied with inspecting the perimeter of the gash across the back of Gladio’s skull. Prompto rounds on the remaining hundlegs in his vicinity. Noct’s rapidly warping between two in his own corner of the clearing, and seems to have the situation well in hand.

The hundlegs skitters toward Prompto, quick on its many many feet. Revulsion edges in on Prompto, as it always does when he has to face down these terrible creepy-crawly types, and he tries to tamp it down as he levels his gun. His finger’s barely twitched on the trigger before the hundlegs is all too close, too close and too fast for Prompto to be able to shoot without probably also blowing off his foot or doing something equally stupid. He hisses and throws his revolver at where he assumes the hundlegs’ head will be in a second and pulls a spell flask out of the armiger. He dissolves the gun just after he hears it hit the grass with a lame thump.

Prompto doesn’t usually use spell flasks. If he’s gonna be throwing anything, he usually sticks with the lumen flares he occasionally pilfers from MTs when the squads dropping in have them. The thing is, he’s out of those and also they are gods awful to get caught in. Spell flasks, on the other hand, can be opened and poured instead of only having one function —which is exploding with as much force as possible all at once. Prompto also vaguely recalls saying that hundlegs are particularly weak to ice magic, and Prompto figures he might as well see if his memory serves correctly now. He’s probably about to get really messed up by this thing anyway, so might as well go down swinging.

Prompto kicks out with his bad leg, catching the hundlegs right where its seventh and eighth sections join. The hundlegs is knocked back a few feet, and even sadly wiggles a little in the air which is almost funny enough to make up for the shooting pain that comes crawling up Prompto’s calf and makes itself at home there like an overeager college freshman in their first dorm room. As the hundlegs recovers from its sudden forced relocation, Prompto uncorks the spell flask and curses as his shaking hands make a few drops of magic drip onto his fingers. His exposed skin burns with cold but Prompto does his best to ignore it as the hundlegs rights itself and darts forward once more. Its horrible mandibles clack as the monster snaps at Prompto, glistening with the eerie green sheen that can only mean that the damn thing is venomous. The only thing that would make hundlegs worse, Prompto thinks, is if they had wings or something. That would be the sign that it was time for Prompto to shuffle off this mortal coil, honestly. You can’t combine a billion trillion legs, poison, and wings all in one absurdly massive insect and expect Prompto to still have hope for a good life.

As the hundlegs rears up to tear off Prompto’s arm or do some other terrible thing to his person, he swings the arm with the flash out, splattering a solid dose of concentrated ice magic on the hundlegs. It screeches, a far cry from its usual quiet clicking noises, and its tough shell bubbles and warps where the hundlegs was hit.

Here is where Prompto would usually say something like ‘hell yeah’ or ‘good riddance’ or one of his personal favorites: ‘begone creepy evildoer.’ Instead of saying any of that though, Prompto haphazardly pours out more of the flask on the cringing insect, all too aware of Ignis and Gladio just a few yards behind him.

The ice doesn’t seem to treat the hundlegs well at all, which is awesome. The hundlegs ducks away from the last dregs of magic that Prompto flings at it, and begins to skitter away, abandoning the fight altogether. When it gets a decent distance away, Prompto materializes his revolver and gives the hundlegs the ol’ what-for in the form of a single bullet through the head. The hundlegs may have been retreating and all, but it and all the others were a mark for a hunt and Prompto isn’t about to forfeit the reward for this shitfest because he let one hundlegs go. 

With Noct finishing up his hundlegs on the other side of the clearing and Prompto’s own issue dealt with, Prompto turns back to Ignis and Gladio and puts his gun away. “You guys okay?”

“Hardly,” Ignis says. He sounds calm enough but his shoulders are all stiff like they always are when something isn’t going Ignis’s way. “We are down to one potion after I used one to stop the bleeding. We need to preserve this for emergencies until we can get back to civilization, so we will all have to deal with whatever scrapes we’ve picked up until then.”

For emergencies is basically code for for Noct, because no one else getting hurt is an emergency if Noct might be too, no matter how severely the other person is injured. 

Gladio stirs a few moments after Noct makes his way over. He’s headachey and dog tired, but otherwise not too badly messed up which is good. Prompto’s heard of some wild things happening to people who try to heal head injuries with potions. Maybe that’s more along the lines of concussions and things of that sort rather than flesh wounds.

Ignis has a veritable collection of bruises and scrapes, but is otherwise unharmed. Noct’s got a wide cut across his left hip that bled sluggishly until Ignis broke the last potion over it in defiance to Noct’s insistence that it wasn’t anything to worry about. Prompto? Well, Prompto’s just fine. Sure, he has a vaguely worrying injury on his right calf, but he figures he can clean it up and bandage it once they’ve returned to the tipster and found someplace to spend the night. They don’t really have the money to be throwing away on every little booboo Prompto gets, even if he does get whiny about them sometimes. Prompto knows this, so he doesn’t bother mentioning it as the group makes their way out of the woods. 

Prompto almost forgets about it until they’re settling down to sleep in the cheapest, rattiest caravan money could buy. As it so happens, Prompto’s pretty good at blocking out physical pain after he’s been dealing with it for a while, which was extraordinarily useful back in high school when his stomach started cramping up whenever Prompto so much as thought about food wrong. He still has that problem in theory, but his meds take care of it for the most part.

Come to think of it, Prompto’s gonna be running out of that medication soon. He can’t exactly go pick up a new prescription from the pharmacy in Insomnia, so he just tries not to think about it for now, same as when his supply of testosterone inevitably ran out a month ago.

“Prompto, the cuff of your boot is torn,” Ignis observes after Gladio lays down for the night and Noct leaves to take up all the hot water in the shower. “Would you like me to take a look at it?”

“Oh,” Prompto crosses his legs, injured ankle resting on his knee, and pokes at the fabric. His pants are also torn ragged above it, narrowly hiding the pulsing gouges in Prompto’s flesh underneath, but his pants don’t have any visible signs of blood unlike the little speckles of red on the white cuffs of his boots. “Nah, I’ve got it. It’s just a little rip in the fabric. I can fix it.”

Prompto hopes Ignis doesn’t see Prompto’s unfruitful attempt to rub out the bloodstains with the pad of his thumb.

“It’s no trouble,” Ignis says. “I’ll be mending Noct’s shirt tomorrow anyway.”

“No worries, Iggy,” Prompto flashes a grin, though it’s probably more strained than not. Now that Prompto’s thinking about his injury he really can’t stop feeling how much it really does hurt. “I took textiles as an elective my freshman year. I can sew just about anything!”

“Is that so?” Ignis’s mouth curls up at the edges, almost imperceptibly. Prompto thinks so, anyway. He might be wrong. He doesn’t think he has ever given Ignis much to smile about. Prompto is a bit of a nuisance, after all. “I learn something new about you every day.”

It’s another forty five minutes until Prompto is able to get into the caravan bathroom. He spent the last ten of it bouncing his good leg on the ground from where he sat on the edge of the bottom bunk on the right side of the caravan. Now that Prompto’s alone, he strips down and steels himself for whatever gross hell he’s going to have to look at.

Ah. His leg does indeed look like a disgusting mess. That’s always fun.

Prompto’s never been alright with seeing his own blood. He isn’t the type to faint when he pricks himself or anything which is great because he’s botched a T shot enough to see a lot of his own blood in his days, but the sight of himself bleeding always has made him feel a little sick. Nausea rolls in Prompto’s gut as he steps into the shower —now mostly cold after the other three men took their turns, but Prompto always lets them go first so he can’t complain— and cleans the wounds in his calf as well as he can while simultaneously avoiding looking at it as much as possible. It hurts, but Prompto knows he’s gotta at least get all the excess blood off his leg before he tries to wrap this thing.

When he steps out of the shower, pulls a new pair of boxers up over his hips, and takes a few cursed moments to inspect his injury, Prompto is relieved to be almost certain that the wounds aren’t bad enough to need stitches. They certainly look bad, but not overly deep or anything. Probably.

Prompto never really did that great in the rushed first aid lessons he got before he entered the Crownsguard. Thankfully out on the road, most of the injuries anyone got could be fixed up with a potion and a kiss to make it stop hurting, but without any excess money for frivolous potion use Prompto is loathe to ask for one now. 

How stupid would he seem, going to Ignis hours after their last battle sheepishly asking for a potion to heal his booboos when they’ve barely got enough curatives to keep the people who really matter up and going? Besides, the straight healing bottles work less and less the longer the injury sits without one. It probably wouldn’t do much good anyway.

So. First aid. Right.

Prompto summons the rarely-used medical kit from the armiger and sets it on the edge of the sink. It’s only ever brought out for pain tabs and hot-cold packs when Noct’s chronic pain flares up, so the good news is that there’s plenty of bandages and gauze and such in there. The bad news is that anyone who gets in here later will definitely be able to tell that some things have been used. Prompto hopes no one thinks anything of it when it happens, because he already feels pretty embarrassed over having to do this in the first place.

Prompto takes out the gauze and bandages, then deliberates over whether he should get out the hydrogen peroxide, too. He knows he probably should but he’s also aware that it stings like a bitch to use and he doesn’t particularly want to subject himself to that.

He sighs and gets it out anyway, arranging the three items neatly on the porcelain edge of the vanity. 

“Alright Prompto,” he says. “Let’s just get this over with.”

Instead of doing the smart thing and rinsing his calf with the hydrogen peroxide with his foot in the shower, he grabs his heel and pulls it up until he’s balanced with one foot in the basin of the sink. It’s not particularly comfortable and it hurts when he wobbles, but he uncaps the bottle and tries to psyche himself up for this anyway.

Prompto thought that rinsing his leg off with water was bad. No, this is much worse. He exhales a pained hiss as the mangled flesh of his calf fizzes with white foam. He narrowly avoids dropping the rest of the peroxide on the floor because his hands start trembling so much. He sloppily recaps it, shoves it back in the open medical kit, and rides the rest of the pain out with his hands clinging to the vanity.

“Okay,” Prompto takes a few moments to just breathe once the worst of it is over. “Okay. Hard part’s over. Just gotta wrap this bad boy and I’m good to go. Great. Good.”

Wrapping his leg is fairly simple, which is a relief after the stress of cleaning it. He layers gauze over the actual open part of the wounds, then wraps his calf in a tight spiral. When he changes into his clothes, one of the more casual outfits he has packed instead of his ‘Guard uniform, he can’t even tell he’s got anything going on under there.

It isn’t that Prompto is really trying to hide his injury, he rationalizes as he puts the medical kit back into the void. He just doesn’t think it’s really that bad and they all have bigger things to worry about using their curatives on. Tons of people get cuts and bites and whatever all the time, especially hunters, and they don’t have magic potions to make it all better. They heal up good as new all on their own, and Prompto can too.

It works fairly well at first. It still hurts of course, but it looks better after one night’s sleep. It doesn’t bleed at all, and Prompto can move around just fine as if he wasn’t injured. As long as he doesn’t hop around too much, then it’s no big deal. He’s got a bit of a headache behind the eyes, but that’s probably just because he didn’t bother putting his contacts in for the first hour after he woke up.

They depart from the caravan with hunt flyers in hand, heading out to get rid of some hecteyes that have started venturing out of Daurell Caverns in the evenings and causing a general ruckus. Gladio’s made a complete recovery from yesterday’s head wound and is roughhousing with Noct a little up ahead. Ignis follows them, while Prompto brings up the rear.

“Now remember,” Ignis says to no one in particular as they near their mark. “The outpost only had basic healing potions, so at this point that is all we have. If you begin to feel poisoned, petrified, or confused, do let us know before you die.”

“Got it,” Prompto salutes with a jaunty two fingers to his brow, though it doesn’t really matter since no one was looking at him.

The setting sun through the trees makes for awesome lighting, and Prompto takes the opportunity to get a picture of Noct as he is encased perfectly within a single god ray emerging from the branches above. Prompto sends a quick thanks to whichever Astral likes photography the most, because wow were the conditions just so right for that shot. 

The sky darkens to a threatening shade just as the party reaches the entrance to Daurell Caverns, and Prompto dispels his camera to the armiger. While he likes battle photography quite a bit, hecteyes look kinda mushy, and the last time Prompto fought a daemon like that he was cleaning flan gunk out of his camera for an entire evening.

It occurs to him, as the hecteyes emerge from the ground, that he absolutely could have just set his camera in the sun and cleaned it that way.

This fight is actually not too bad. Noct and Ignis go at it with spears while Gladio flings his shield around like it’s a weapon all on its own. Prompto’s guns don’t do a whole lot, but he keeps a starshell suspended in the air at all times to weaken the hecteyes and ward off any other nasties from getting the drop on them so at least he’s doing something useful.

The walk back to the tipster is tense in the way that all night travel is. Everyone is some level of twitchy, heads on the swivel for daemons at all times. Nothing more comes up, which is a wonderful stroke of luck for once, though Prompto does trip once by catching his foot on the step up from ground to paved road.

“Woah hey, you alright?” Noct holds out a hand to help Prompto up and Prompto takes it, smiling weakly through the headache he had coming on like all day. “Gods, you’re really hot.”

“Not too bad yourself,” Prompto returns.

“Oh shut up,” Noct rolls his eyes. “You know what I mean. Are you getting sick or something?”

“Dunno, maybe.”

And that’s that on that until Prompto heads to bed. He settles into the same bunk he took last night in that same shitty caravan without bothering to shower and doesn’t really think about his leg too much other than a vague awareness of the fact that it isn’t feeling so great after a day on his feet. He figures its normal and cajoles himself into sleeping with a calm music playlist played through his earbuds from his phone.

When Prompto wakes up, it’s two in the morning. He blinks blearily at his phone’s display, wondering why the hell his body decided to wake at such a ridiculous time of night, before nausea suddenly overwhelms him. He throws himself out of bed, stumbles to the bathroom, closes the door as quietly as he can, and barely gets his head over the toilet bowl before he’s coughing up the quick dinner he ate before he went to bed along with a hell of a lot of stomach acid judging by the burn of it. His mouth tastes like metal. Prompto closes his eyes and pulls the handle on the tank without looking at whatever fresh hell he’s just expelled from his body. He knows from past experience that looking at anything he’s just heaved up from his stomach makes it almost certain that he’ll throw up again and that’s the last thing he wants to do.

“Shit,” Prompto murmurs. He staggers to his feet and turns on the sink taps, collecting water in his hands to rinse his mouth out with. His stomach cramps painfully, and he shivers with the force of it. “Guess it’s one of these nights.”

Back in high school when his stomach cramps got too bad to be able to sleep during, Prompto used to lay on the bathroom floor with a blanket and a space heater plugged in near him. It was almost definitely a fire risk, but the combination of the cold tile through his blanket and the warmth from the space heater always made him feel better somehow. 

Prompto doesn’t have a space heater and he didn’t bring his blanket in here with him, but he lowers himself back down to the floor anyway and pillows his head on his arm. He knows he’ll have to get up eventually, but he’s feeling too rotten right now to worry about it. The bathroom is pleasantly dark since he never turned on a light, and the tile feels good against his skin.

The bathroom floor plan works for all of ten minutes before Prompto starts coughing and gagging again. He doesn’t have anything left in him to bring up, so he spits out weirdly coppery tasting bile and rests his head against the outside of the bowl between fits. He doesn’t even have it in him to consider what’s wrong, he just wants to get back to sleep.

After what feels like forever, Prompto’s body calms down enough for him to lay back down on the floor. It takes him longer than he’d like to doze off, but eventually he manages it.

**Author's Note:**

> N: "Oh right, you hate bugs."  
> P: "Me? Yeah, can't stand 'em."  
> N: "Same here. Icky."


End file.
